Bug#1004522: debian-policy: Proposing new virtual package: wayland-session
Package: debian-policy
Version: 4.6.0.1
Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
GNOME's gdm3 and KDE's sddm both enumerate possible Wayland sessions in
/usr/{,local/}share/wayland-sessions/*.desktop and make them available
as desktop sessions that users can choose, in addition to listing the
X11 sessions that they traditionally did.
At the moment, installing gdm3 pulls in either gnome-session (a minimal
GNOME desktop), or some sort of X11 thing (usually a session manager,
but sometimes a window manager or an xterm), but it should ideally
be possible to install gdm3 as a login prompt from which to launch a
non-GNOME Wayland session like weston or sway.
I propose this entry for virtual-package-names-list.yaml:
- name: wayland-session
description: a Wayland desktop session (/usr/share/wayland-sessions/*.desktop)
According to `apt-file search`, it should initially be provided by these:
gnome-session: /usr/share/wayland-sessions/gnome.desktop
phosh: /usr/share/wayland-sessions/phosh.desktop
plasma-workspace-wayland: /usr/share/wayland-sessions/plasmawayland.desktop
sway: /usr/share/wayland-sessions/sway.desktop
weston: /usr/share/wayland-sessions/weston.desktop
and perhaps also (I don't know how practical this one is for actual use):
mir-demos: /usr/share/wayland-sessions/mir-shell.desktop
Rationale for not using the names people are probably going to suggest:
- wayland-compositor would be wrong, because it's too low-level. Some
Wayland compositors are a somewhat complete desktop environment in their
own right, but for example plasma-workspace-wayland and gnome-session
are larger components that merely *depend on* a Wayland compositor, plus
the additional components needed to get a practical desktop environment;
meanwhile, kwin-wayland and gnome-shell are Wayland compositors, but
are not desktop environments on their own.
- wayland-session-manager seems like it would be misleading, because an X
session manager has specific functional expectations (XSMP) separating
it from an mere x-window-manager, but there's no such thing in Wayland.
smcv
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